Archive for the ‘Microfinance’ Category

Spring 2014 CSWS Research Matters:
“In Guatemala: Everyday Practices and Experiences of Development through Women’s Eyes,” by Erin Beck, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon Department of Political Science

Political science professor Erin Beck’s ethnographic study of women in Guatemala who are enrolled in programs of non-governmental organizations with contrasting styles shows that “development is an emergent process that is shaped by the interactions between ‘developers’ and their ‘beneficiaries.’”

Lamia Karim’s book, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) is featured in the Fall 2012/ Winter 2013 issue of Brandeis Magazine. An associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon and the former associate director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, Lamia Karim (’84) came to Brandeis as a Wien Scholar.

December 14, 2011—CSWS Associate Director Lamia Karim quoted in The New Republic:

…“Skepticism of microfinance and its benefits, meanwhile, has migrated to the academy as well. Lamia Karim, an anthropologist at the University of Oregon and the author of Microfinance and Its Discontents, has questioned the claim that offering small loans directly to Bangladeshi women has been empowering. On the contrary, she has found women are often pressured to hand over loans to their husbands or male relatives. At the same time, microcredit agencies have created what she terms an “economy of shame,” in which the traditional role of women as bearers of “family honor” is used to leverage repayments—a key yardstick of MFIs’ success. (Grameen, for instance, proudly trumpets a loan recovery rate of close to 97 percent). To avoid the public shame of default, many women take out additional loans from different lenders, and quickly find themselves mired in a quicksand of debt.”…

Lamia Karim, Anthropology and Associate Director of CSWS, discusses her forthcoming book Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, the first feminist critique of the much-lauded microcredit process in Bangladesh. She describes the adverse effects of the microcredit system. Watch it online.

March 8, 2011: Court Upholds Yunus Sacking from Grameen — Wall Street Journal (A high court in Bangladesh Tuesday upheld a central bank decision last week that Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus must resign as head of the microfinance bank he founded, intensifying a struggle between Mr. Yunus and the government of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. …”A lot of this has to do with the personal animosity between Sheikh Hasina and Muhammad Yunus,” said Lamia Karim, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon-Eugene who has written a book on Grameen Bank.) — Noted in the UO Office of Communications daily eclips

Editor’s Note: Lamia Karim, associate director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, has a new book coming out the end of March. Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press) is an in-depth feminist critique of the much-lauded microcredit process in Bangladesh.

Lamia Karim, associate professor of the University of Oregon Department of Anthropology and associate director of the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society, was interviewed March 2 on NPR for her expertise on microfinance and the Grameen Bank. The story, titled “Nobel Winner Removed From Bank He Founded,” focuses on the efforts of the Central Bank of Bangladesh to remove Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus from his post as director of the Grameen Bank.

Karim had critical remarks to make about the effects of microfinance lending by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh: “Women, poor women in particular, are getting deeper and deeper in debt. And this is largely because, similar to the banking industry in the U.S., microfinance for a very long time has been an unregulated industry. So people could go out and extend loans to people without any kind of oversight.”